Halo Goes Open Source – Paranoid Android Uploads Halo Code to Github

June 10, 2013 - Written By Alexander Maxham

There was one feature of Facebook Home that I think we can all agree that we loved, and that was Chat heads. It’s one of the best decisions Facebook has made in quite a while. The folks at Paranoid Android went ahead and added Chat Heads to their ROM, but it works for every app on your device. It’s also called Halo. We’ve taken a look at it already in preview, alpha and beta builds. It’s just getting better and better. Now Paranoid Android has gone ahead and uploaded the code to Github so ROM developers can go ahead and add Halo to their own ROMs.

Like we said, Halo is still beta, but it’s constantly changing and changing quickly. The code on Github still needs to be cleaned up a bit. Then again support for Tablet UI and PIE could also use some cleaning up. There are currently no “show-stopping” bugs with Halo, and all the changes have been merged into Github with the main branch. Paranoid Android lists all the alterations on Git:

HALO has white & blacklists now. Blacklists prevent apps from pinging through HALO. Whitelists do the same but only allow pinging when you explicitly allow it for individual apps.